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cpinto

71 karma · joined July 19, 2007

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cpinto··on Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude
Thanks for participating in the discussion Felix. A big issue for me - not sure if others suffer from this - is that it’s next to impossible to track work in progress, especially with when there are artefacts involved or reports etc. Things that require multi-day work of back and forth and reflection.

Chat is a horrible interface for this, having to scroll up and down across lengthy conversations to try and pick up a thread.

I’m really sorry but I really fail to understand why this massive push to “chatify” everything. A task with its own context and multiple chats feel like a much better approach to work. Even if the work is spawned from a main chat window - eg “Claude we need to work on XYZ” and it creates a task to track this piece of work.

Further, recurring tasks again are really really hard to manage with a chat interface - which of the 10 chats has that question that the recurring task raised?!

And of course all this UX debt will likely stand in your way of building reactive items - ie spawning a task in response to some outside event. Think an inbound email being handled by a prompt that triggers a task and creates a draft response ready for my review and approval. Very hard to do with chat windows.

cpinto··on Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex
But you _can_ verify if you had bothered: https://asana.com/inside-asana/migrating-off-enzyme-2-weeks

Key statement:

> But at the rate we were going, we were still roughly five years from finishing.

Everyone has seen how this sort of thing comes about: it's meaningful work for engineering but never business/product critical so it just drags along.

Seems like this time around someone just went "I wonder if we could do it this way" and it worked. Perfect example of ditching sunk-cost and starting from scratch. Great outcome for them.

cpinto··on OpenLogi
That’s not feedback, just a non-constructive opinion. As someone else wrote above, if you’re so precious about it then help out the devs of the project and submit design PRs.
cpinto··on Building reliable agentic AI systems
I’m trying to solve this problem and would love to get some feedback: https://entidade.wls-labs.com
cpinto··on The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI
I'll offer a different perspective on this: for years we (product/c-suite people) constantly got push back that giving a goal was no longer enough, we had to articulate the path to the goal in excruciating detail.

If I need to think about the solution that hard, I may just as well take it all the way, remove the middleman and get some efficiency back.

There's still a way out of this mess though. All it takes is for folks to take shared ownership for hitting the goal and bring their expertise to the table to help draw the path to the goal.

cpinto··on The Economics of Software Teams: Why Most Engineering Orgs Are Flying Blind
You’re absolutely right, but just to a point. It should be easy to clearly quantify the desired financial outcome of a sprint, but not of its components. I don’t want to spend a single minute figuring out the financial outcome of a single ticket.
cpinto··on LLMs are mirrors of operator skill
Have you tried writing rules for how you want things done, instead of repeating the same things every time?
cpinto··on Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
what are the plans to support design systems? no one seems to be able to do this. prototyping doesn't happen in a vacuum, I'll always want to use the design system we spent months building in Figma.
cpinto··on What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
How many things on the internet do you really need and that are paid for via advertising?
cpinto··on Show HN: CommitAsync – $100K+ dev jobs 100% remote only
NullPointerException, ie crash; I assume, but I’m a business guy
cpinto··on The Angel, Islington
exactly! I do not understand the British obsession for preserving insane amounts of crooked-walled buildings with horrible insulation ratings. zero historical interest, 100% NIMBY-ism. then the general populace mopes about the lack of housing, and dreams 15-minute cities without realising the only way to solve both is tear down what’s taking up space and build tall instead.
cpinto··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2023)
Pixie | https://usepixie.com | Lisbon, Portugal | Full time | Onsite/Hybrid

Our app helps small accounting firms streamline and automate workflows for thousands of clients in just 2 weeks or less.

We're already supporting ~700 accounting firms worldwide with just a tiny seed round led by A-tier tech VC investors like Seedcamp, MMC Ventures, and TriplePoint. Players in the space have approached us about acquisitions but we want to go all the way.

Our goal is to have 100,000 firms running on Pixie in the next ten years and we're looking for great talent to join our product team in sunny Lisbon:

- Senior full-stack/product engineers (Ruby on Rails + VueJS): https://landing.jobs/at/pixie/sr-full-stack-engineer-rails-j...

- Mid-level product manager: https://landing.jobs/at/pixie/product-manager-in-lisbon-2022...

- Mid/Senior Product Designer: https://landing.jobs/at/pixie/product-designer-in-lisbon-202...

- Junior/Mid-level full stack engineers (Ruby on Rails + VueJS): https://landing.jobs/at/pixie/mid-level-full-stack-engineer-...

cpinto··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2022)
Pixie | https://usepixie.com | Lisbon, Portugal | Full time | Onsite/Hybrid

Our app helps small accounting firms streamline and automate workflows for thousands of clients in just 2 weeks or less.

We're already supporting ~700 accounting firms worldwide with just a tiny seed round led by A-tier tech VC investors like Seedcamp, MMC Ventures, and TriplePoint. Players in the space have approached us about acquisitions but we want to go all the way.

Our goal is to have 100,000 firms running on Pixie in the next ten years and we're looking for great talent to join our product team in sunny Lisbon:

- Senior full-stack/product engineers

- Mid-level product manager

Our stack is based on the latest RoR, VueJS 3, Postgresql, ElasticSearch, Redis, Kubernetes, Gitlab CI.

Email celso [at] usepixie.com if you'd like to have an initial chat about these roles.

cpinto··on Quiet.js – Transmit and receive data in the browser at 44.1kHz
At max 44kilobits per second, or 5.5KB/second.
cpinto··on Ask HN: Who's Looking for a Co-Founder?
I am bootstrapping UsePixie.com, which is a Basecamp for accountants. Just barely launched in fact. Feedback has been really good and a few firms are using it. Tiny team, distributed, but the company’s UK based.

I’m looking for a full stack tech lead to take over from me, but I’d surely prefer a more experienced/senior long term partner/co-founder.

Tech stack is Rails running on AWS, with sprinkles of Vue in a few key parts of the app.

These are the principles that have guided us so far: https://medium.com/pomarhq/pomars-guiding-principles-ca00356...

If anyone’s interested my email is celso@usepixie.com

cpinto··on Ask HN: Do you want email parsing API for free?
No. Although the email parser as a service idea is nice, it has a couple of major downsides.

For starters, it’s now a GDPR world: I want to avoid the risk of breaches on your side affecting mine. Secondly, today you want to send nice compensation emails, tomorrow (under pressure from your board) you start mining the emails for competitive research and increased monetisation. I wouldn’t want to put the reputation of my service on the line for this.

cpinto··on Show HN: Turn Mailchimp data into awesome insights
Hi everyone, would love to have your feedback, shares or sign ups. All is welcome :)
cpinto··on Show HN: Supercharge Your Customer Feedback
Good point, thanks for the feedback :)
cpinto··on Show HN: Supercharge Your Customer Feedback
That's pretty much the idea, with a few extra add-ons like console logs and plugging into existing customer support channels.

I've found this type of feedback tool to be really helpful in reducing the amount of back and forward when handling suggestions or problems in web apps. Hopefully it'll, at the very least, make the "What browser are you using" reply go away.

cpinto··on Failing the Startup Game at Unbabel – Take 2
Employee contracts in Portugal have one of two forms: "fixed term" and "long term". Long term is when there is no deadline for the contract to expire (also, it's the most common type) and it says you're entitled 1mo (perhaps now it's less) of compensation for each year working for the company.

Fixed term, however, has a different set of compensation rules, one of them being that if the employer breaks the contract 1 month into it, the employer still needs to pay for the extra 2 months. This appears to be your case/contract. However, from Vasco's previous comment, it does seem like that has been sorted, so your case does not appear to have grounds I'm afraid.

Personally, I'd recommend moving on, it may be the top thing on your mind right now, but in a year it won't matter one bit.

cpinto··on How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing
In Europe taxpayers waste millions with the tax authorities' pre-filled/free filing systems. The major reason for that is that once you have free filing with some data preloaded, human behaviour kicks in and you either spend some time figuring out where to minimize your tax losses (rational economic behaviour) or accept the tax return presented by the tax authorities and go with that even if it means wasting money (irrational behaviour).

To give a sense of how big a problem this is, here in the UK a report came out last year that pointed to £12.6B wasted. In Portugal, waste is around €2B if our math is right.

(Shameless plug): At http://gosimpletax.com we're actually helping taxpayers save as much as possible with as little friction as possible. We're currently operating in the UK & Portugal and would be great to have your feedback if you're in any of these countries.

cpinto··on Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds
Let the memes begin! Here's an image template of Linus giving the finger: https://skitch.com/cpinto/ebemj/linus
cpinto··on Business idea: recommendation system for physical stores
Great feedback.

1) Indeed, price checking is already in place so perhaps in those cases the recommendation system can send data into them?

2) not the target market, not enough data. Remember, a small market that has huge value is still a valuable market worth pursuing.

3) Of course no one browses the stores :-) But when you make a buy there, you're already in a spending mindset so stores can take advantage of that to promote things that may interest you more. With the receipt recommendations, you should be able to track data across shopping sessions. Like a cookie ;-)

5) I don't think any of the possible clients will allow you to store the details elsewhere than at their own DC.

Thanks for the feedback.

cpinto··on Business idea: recommendation system for physical stores
I wished :-)
cpinto··on Business idea: recommendation system for physical stores
I have my own software company (http://leftfield.pt). This would be best pulled off by people with lots of experience in software integration (CRM, POS) both engineering as well as sales.
cpinto··on Business idea: recommendation system for physical stores
Daniel, this is not a product for consumers it's for big retail, eg. Fnac (Europe), etc.
cpinto··on Business idea: recommendation system for physical stores
Like I said, I don't have any intention of pursuing this one any more :-) That said, I'd be more than glad to share opinions with anyone that wants to do this.
cpinto··on Ask HN: what taxes/tax forms does a freelancer need to submit?
Thanks! Is there anything similar to sales taxes that are charged to the customer and then paid to the state?
cpinto··on Ask HN: What hardware/software do you use in your daily life?
at the most basic: plenty of paper sheets and a pencil. I use this _a lot_.

for coding: any computer with vim is good enough, but my main machine is a MBP 15" w/ a 23" flat screen, wireless apple keyboard and mouse. I use the iphone a lot to snap pictures of said paper scribbles but I usually keep them in the iphoto library or upload to goplan. lots of people I know swear by evernote, but I don't get it and as such I don't use it. when in need to do HTML, I start up textmate (although I'm not very impressed with it, it does get the job done in a reasonable ammount of time). nor am I a huge github fan, although it's pretty easy to use.

for management: goplan (http://goplanapp.com) for basic project management, excel for cashflow management, keeping track of generic project stuff, metrics, short term projections, etc. I'm also back to using word a lot to write specs, although I prefered to use Google Wave for that until the specs were closed but as they're shutting it down I stopped using it.

for communications: calling people and email when calling isn't appropriate. call me old fashioned but actually talking to people sorts lots of issues very fast and time is the one thing you'll never get back so I see no point on wasting it.

If I had to elect one single thing as what makes me productive, I'd say it's other people who get their part of the job done, not any hw/sw tools.

cpinto··on Started freelancing last month and this service has been invaluable
this link should come with a disclaimer of sorts. so this guy started freelancing last month and already a complex app for billing + time management has been invaluable? In one month, even word + excel (or whatever office suit you use) is invaluable.
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